Folly by Jassy Mackenzie Page B

postponing it wasn’t going to make the job any easier.
    After the handyman had left, I phoned Goodness and asked him to meet me at the folly later that afternoon when he’d finished up and fed the horses.
    I passed the time by working on my dungeon. First, I painted the sides of the gym horse red and left the pieces outside to dry. Next, I climbed the stepladder to finish attaching some of the equipment that I simply hadn’t been able to ask the handyman to do.
    The chains, for instance. Not even a blithely worded story about a children’s adventure area could have reasonably explained their presence, so I’d kept them out of sight and had asked the handyman to attach a heavy bolt – for a swing, I’d told him – to one of the beams, which in turn had been used to anchor a series of four massive metal hooks that even the pirate captain himself would have found oversized.
    I looped the top of the chains over these hooks and, climbing down the ladder again, attached their ends to the handles at the bottom of the wall using large carabiners. With that one simple action, it was amazing how the room suddenly looked like a destination for kinky activities. Those silvery links, gleaming dully, stretched against the backdrop of matte black paint –my dungeon looked the part. I could imagine it as a destination that clients would pay to visit.
    When the paint was dry I reassembled the vaulting horse and placed it in the centre of the room. It looked magnificent – a crimson focal point that promised hours of painful pleasure and humiliation to those who were soon to bend over its padded back.
    The black-painted bookshelves were now home to various other accessories. Candles and matches in case the electricity department decided I was a repeat offender and should be punished myself, the leather halter, bags of bulldog clips, as well as a make-up kit, ladies’ underwear, a frilly maid’s apron, a pair of stiletto-heeled sandals in size eight, and another in a size ten, a box of tissues and a tube of KY jelly.
    Another shelf contained cleaning equipment, including surgical spirits and liquid disinfectant as well as disposable antibacterial wipes. I was determined that my dungeon wouldn’t disappoint the health and safety inspectors if they were to visit – not in the area of hygiene, at any rate.
    A tap on the closed door told me that Goodness had arrived.
    I took a deep breath and hoped I’d have the strength to get through this conversation without actually dying of mortification.
    He was waiting patiently outside, hands clasped in front of him, the sleeves of his blue overalls rolled back to the elbow.
    â€˜Ah, Goodness,’ I said.
    He nodded in reply.
    Immediately, I felt my cheeks go hot. I had no idea how I was going to effectively explain the ins and outs of my new career to my innocent employee, a gentle man who had never completed his schooling and whose English was rather sketchy.
    Despite the language barrier that sometimes caused things to be lost in translation, we had a relationship of mutual respect that stretched back all the way to the day when he had arrived at my gate, young, skinny and shivering in a ragged T -shirt and shabby trousers on a breezy winter’s day, desperate for a job. Never, ever, since that day I hired him had he betrayed my trust or let me down. I’d just have to hope that he could trust me, and understand my circumstances, when it came to this matter.
    â€˜Goodness,’ I began, fixing my eyes firmly on a point somewhere between his face and the freshly weeded and repaired pathway. ‘I don’t know if you are aware of this, but since Mark’s accident money has been very short.’
    â€˜Yes, I know,’ he said quietly. He wasn’t looking at me either but was staring at a point somewhere between my shoes and the folly door, with a set expression on his face, and I realised with a terrible lurch of my